Backing Up the Cloud & Keeping It Human

Written By:

Dan Gould

On Monday, Nick Saber had the harrowing experience of being temporarily locked out of all his Google services. A cryptically simple message saying ” Sorry, your account has been disabled” was the only clue as to why this happened. After sending several emails to customer service, Saber only got a vague automated response. Keep in mind, he’s also a paying customer.

Although Saber eventually got his account re-activated, this shows one of the possible dangers of the increasingly popular cloud computing. For anyone unfamiliar, the premise of “the cloud” is that software will be primarily web based, and data will reside on remote servers, not on local hard drives (think Google Docs, Amazon S3). So what happens if services go down when you need them most?

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